chris: the debate also will challenge president obama to convince voters things could have been worse without blaming george b. bush as did he last time. >> one of the things i think we have to recognize is pursuing the same kinds of policies that we pursued over the last eight years is not going to bring down the deficit. and frankly senator mccain voted for 4-5 of president bush's budgets. >> senator obama, i am not president bush. if you wanted to run against president bush you should have run four years ago. chris: there's an example of a well-prepared -- we knew, i'm sure senator mccain knew that was coming. you notice how he did that automatically? this time around it's more dangerous, isn't it? for president obama to blame a guy four years ago. >> yeah, because people are going to say, what did you do lately? you've had four years to fix the economy and look at the economic malaise we're still in. look at the jobs reports. last month, adding 96,000 jobs. not even enough to keep pace with population growth. chris: we put the first debate to the matthews meter. 12 of our regulars